Full text of speech by Joe Lieberman at Grand Gathering – 2017

Thank you very much. Bob Torricelli, Madam Rajavi, honored guests from around the world. Ladies and gentlemen I am trolled to be here once again to join with you in the resistance to the evil regime that dominates Iran today.

And I want to say to you as I look out at this vast crowd. you know once I had the great honor of running for vice president of the United States I never addressed a crowd this big when I was running.You know now that I think about it if I could only have had about a thousand of you in Florida maybe I could have taken office it is a longer story.I want to say that each one of you that the size and Commitment of this gathering sends a powerful message to both the our enemies in Tehran and the people of Iran yearning for change that every one of you didn't just make a decision to come here to this meeting. By making that decision you have put yourselves into history.And you are identified with the destiny, that is a destiny for freedom. One of the great freedom fighters in American history Dr Martin Luther King said the moral arc of the universe may bend slowly but it always bends toward justice I want to say to you today that the political ark of the universe may bend slowly but it always bends toward freedom. Sometimes we have to help to bend the arc more quickly and that is what your presence here today can make possible.

Dr. King also gave his greatest speech at the Lincoln Memorial a symbol of freedom in America, I have a dream and I want to share with you a dream that I have for the Middle East. I have a dream paraphrasing Dr. King that all of the people of that region, Muslims Christians, and Jews, Shiites and Sunnis, Israelis and Palestinians will sit down together at the table of brotherhood and sisterhood and peace and freedom. That is our dream am and I will tell you the most significant step forward in realizing that dream will be to change the regime in Iran and bring freedom to the people of Iran it can't happen with this regime.

Every time we meet here at this gathering it gives us an opportunity to look back at the year past and see what are the cause of resistance has made any progress. As other speakers have said this has been a year of tremendous progress. The change of administrations in America has made a dramatic difference in our policy toward Iran and I speak as a Democrat and somebody who supported Hillary Clinton but going from the Obama administration to the Trump administration is going from an administration that was centered on somehow improving our relations with Iran at the high cost of ignoring the reality of the evil of this regime to an administration where early on the new President Trump has said that the number one enemy of the United Sates has in the Middle East is the regime that currently controls Iran. That’s a big difference. The second difference and I don't have to say much about it after the extraordinary words of His Royal Highness Turki, is that the Arab nations are energized under the leadership of King Salman and current prince Bin Salman, they are more active diplomatically and militarily as part of a resistance against the regime in Iran than we've ever seen before, and of course for a long time the state of Israel because its very existence is threatened by the regime in Iran has wanted to help change that regime. So you have coming together now a mighty coalition of forces. America, the Arab world and Israel joining with the resistance and that should give us hope that we can make this change. The one thing that has not changed in the Middle East is the behavior of the regime in Tehran. I know President Obama felt that if we negotiated the nuclear agreement with Iran they would become more moderate. They haven't, their aggression continues throughout the region, their support of terrorism which has killed so many including many Americans continues there. Repression of the human rights of the people of Iran continues. You know a while back Baghdadi the leader of ISIS declared a Caliphate of Islamist extremism in the Middle East and said its capital was in Iraq. As you know ISIS is now being pushed out of that capital thank god, but Iraq was never the capital of Islamist extremism and terrorism. The capital since 1979 of Islamist extremism and terrorism has been in Tehran under this extremist regime and that is why it's got to go.

But some things have changed inside Iran and that's at the level of the people. You can never suppress a people you can never enslave a people forever. The people of Iran inside Iran have shown the courage to rise up. In the past year as you know there is a social movement that has adopted the cause of bringing to light what happened to the thirty thousand Iranians mostly members of the MEK who were massacred in 1988. One day just as there was and South Africa after Apartheid ended, there will be a truth commission in Iran that will reveal the horrible truth of what this regime did.To just talk about that, to hold Madam Rajavi's picture up in public places is a sign of the unrest of the people and the growing confidence of the people that change is near, the same is true of the remarkable public disagreements between the various leaders of the country. In the United States who are now doing a review of our policy toward Iran and I hope that one element of it builds on our successful policy during the Cold War. Long before the Berlin wall collapsed long before the Soviet Union fell, the United States was supporting resistance movements within the former Soviet Union. It is time for America and hopefully some of our allies in Europe to give whatever support we can to those who are fighting for freedom within Iran.

Ladies and gentlemen:

I just want to say to you finally following Newt Gingrich was a historian and but speaking briefly, it's hard not to see the resemblance between the resistance that you and the people of Iran are part of and those who fought for America's freedom in the revolution in the 18th century. Are those who fought for the freedom of France there in the 19th century, are those who fought against Nazism and fascism and communism during the twentieth century. Every one of those fights every one of those struggles for freedom ended successfully, and with the help of God and our continued partnership this one will too so I end with a prayer, that sometime soon maybe even next year, we are able to hold this meeting in a free Tehran and in a free Iran.

Senator Joseph Lieberman is former U.S. Senator and Democratic Party's nominee for Vice President in the 2000 election

The RAND National Defense Research Institute published in July 2009 the report The Mujahedin-e Khalq: A Policy Conundrum for the Multi-National Force-Iraq, Task Force 134 (Detainee Operations). The report focuses on the circumstances surrounding the detention of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MeK) at Camp Ashraf and “whether MeK members were taken into custody…